Moog’s New Theremini Looks Like a Spaceship, and Sounds Like One Too

The new Theremini from Moog Music, Inc. Ariel Zambelich

The theremin may be one of the oldest electronic musical instruments—it was 1920 when Leo Theremin first cooked up his simple box with antennas sticking out of it—but it’s a device that even today remains firmly anchored in the future.

The tone is otherworldly, sort of a buzzing, nasal whine. In post-war pop culture, it was the perfect weapon for setting the appropriate mood on soundtracks for films and radio shows about aliens. Adding to its unearthly vibe is the fact that you play it without even touching it. The theremin’s pitch and volume are controlled by moving your hands closer to and farther away from the two metal antennas. This not only makes the theremin a freakish crowd-pleaser, but it also makes it freakishly difficult to control. Your “playing” hand moves around in thin air, so pitch can’t be dialed in precisely, and it relies on the player knowing exactly where to place his or her hand in order to hit specific notes. Very few could master its peculiarities; Clara Rockmore famously tamed it, but most mortals just used it to make blooo-eee-boop noises, or to annoy pets, spouses, and bandmates.

Synthesizer pioneer Bob Moog began his career in musical instrument manufacturing in the 1950s by selling a simple theremin kit, so it makes sense that the company bearing his name would release the best 21st century upgrade to the theremin I’ve seen so far.

The Theremini ($319) is the latest instrument from Moog Music. The new design is not only retro-beautiful, but it injects some welcome playability into the almost-100-year-old concept. The classic theremin sound is still there, but you can now dial in pitch control. On a standard theremin, moving your right hand towards the antenna would result in a clean glissando sweep, and ever-moving-upwards note. With the Theremini’s pitch control turned on, you get a nice stair-step, so the sound advances up the scale one note at a time without all those messy notes-between-notes. Which particular scale it snaps to—major, minor, dorian, mixolydian, pentatonic, “Gypsy,” “Ryukyu”—and which root note is used gets dialed in by the performer and displayed on the LCD on the front. The level of pitch control is up to you. Same with the oscillator filter control and the built-in echo effect.

I’m happy to report it plays just like a regular theremin when you want it to. There’s a little speaker on top, along with all manner of connections on the back for plugging it into a computer or an amp. But all the glory of Leo’s original design—waving your hands around and evoking the deepest astral melancholy—is here. The new additions like the pitch control and built-in echo make it easier to play alongside other musicians, and they make the instrument far more endearing to listen to on its own, no matter how terrible you are at it.

Perhaps the best addition, though, is the selection of voices. The Moog team pulled some of its best-loved synth voices from the Animoog, its super-popular and super-fun iOS instrument, and baked them into the Theremini. So in addition to the classic theremin whoop, you get over 30 presets of synthy skronks, Taurus tubas, percussive plunks, and polyphonic pitter-patter. Groovy, baby.